When Hell Came to Our Home Update October 22

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I'm making a flying visit to our house for the first time in 11 days. There's private papers scattered all over the floor and other evidence of another break-in.

But we finally talked to someone who was willing to put us on the trail of the more specialized lawyers. And we got a video camera with a good audio pickup.

I'll update when I can. Internet access is problematic when I'm away from the house.

When Hell Came to Our Home Update October 21

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Still out here. Progress is being made on various fronts, but it's slow going.

Can anyone recommend a video camera with a good audio pickup?

The children are starting to get fretful, being away from home for so long and moving so much. This nonsense is hard on them.

What's the contact infor for the Huffington Post?

I must commend the DHS for their efforts to "treat" my depression. Right now I'm too darn angry about what they have done to be depressed.

When Hell Came to Our Home Update October 18

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After many hours of wrangling our lawyer got a copy of the DHS's "Individual Service Plan" for myself and my husband. It's a hoot. Counselors we've shown this to have hit the roof. It only has one signature attached to it, and that isn't anyone I've seen or talked to. Each section has a different date, and a different due date. Everything is out of compliance with the official state practices. Some of it is against state law, other parts of itare against official insurance practices. Some of it isn't even worded in complete sentences.

Part 1 says:

"...will correct her home deficiencies to corrrect but arenot(sp) limited to replaceing the dead bolt lock"

This is:

1) ungrammatical,

2) incorrectly spelled, and

3) the deadbolt lock they want me to remove is next to a front door window that's already been broken into before. The insurance people would hit the roof over that!

Part 2 wants the children's medical/dental records BUT doesn't offer to pay for them. I learned today that's not kosher.

Part 3 says:

"...will provide proof/confirmation that the children's educational needs are being met."

That's ILLEGAL in Mississippi.

Part 4:

"the dead bolt will be replaced with a safer type of lock..."

DHS, meet insurance people. Insurance people, meet DHS.

There's no "client" signature. There's no "social worker" signature. There is an "ASWS" signature -- but no date. I was told that the ASWS is the social worker supervisor. BUT the person who signed in the "ASWS signature" slot is not a social worker supervisor. She's not even a social worker. Melody Hamilton, who has the only signature on the entire document that they faxed our lawyer, is a student intern working in their office.

How many ways can you say FAIL!

When Hell Came to Our Home October 14 Update

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We emailed the FBI and some support and media outlets today. Please suggest anyone you can think of.

ETA: I'm Debbie Byrd Shinn. The women who contacted me who said they were from DHS named themselves Patti Young, Natasha Ivory, and Joyce Cook. None of those names are in the MS Employee registery: http://dsitspe01.its.ms.gov/its/webphone.nsf/Home?OpenForm

Ever since the activity started at the trailer next door, dh smelled a lot of ammonia and organic solvents in the evening. He originally put it down to remodeling. He also remembers being asked if he could show somebody how to "cook something" last year. "Cook what?" he asked puzzled.

Here is a letter my husband prepared for the FBI. Please forward it to any parties who might be interested:



Over the last several weeks my wife has been the subject of an harassment campaign.

She has blogged this at crabby-lioness.livejournal.com

Most of this happens when I am not at home.

This began with a daylight breaking and entry, and what was suggested by the county attorney to be an attemptedkidnapping of our son. And the telephone went dead 1 hour before all this. (No reply from PSC.)

Deputy Jimmy Rappe,in no uniform, but acting as such still, refused to look at the door, but told my wife DHS would respond; he was interested only in the child being out of the house, and told her not to lock the door.

The sheriff’s dept. knows about the evidence of the break-in, but have never picked it up from the Okolona police.

DHS blames my wife for letting the baby out of the house, as if this break-in never happened. The county attourney even suggested this was an attempted kidnapping; we have asked him as well to have this investigated.

One day after that when my family was with relatives in another county, Chris Ware Chickasaw SD, called me at work,that there was an emergency at my house, that some of my family were inside injured, and no one would come to thedoor. I told him no one was at home. He and DHS said they did not believe me. I said if anyone was in my house, they had broken in, and asked Ware to investigate the windows and doors – he refused. Okolona police recommended we get a civil rights attorney at this point, but none up here will take our case.

More items of harassment came in a steady trickle as we tried to find a way to move.

Saturday, Oct. 9, 2010, our home was entered shortly after we left. About 45 minutes after we left, 3:27 pm,someone called my telephone, and a stranger inside picked up. They discussed and viewed my wife’s medical records,which we found by the telephone. Our attorney did not want us to report this, and it does seem a little pointless since an Okolona policeman thinks one of the voices is Jimmy Rappe, of the Chickasaw SD.

His mother lives next door (see the trailer story following) and has made threatening statements before.

Please read her further descriptions and help us end this harassment.

I suspect something is going on over at the trailer near us; it was almost abandoned until about 2 months ago.

I have smelled ammonia and strong organic solvents (I have a degree in chemistry) from that direction since.

One night, several people came down, turned off the outside light, carried boxes into the pitch-black interior, then emerged with even more boxes, coming down steps and loading these into vehicles in total darkness. Something is going on.

We have removed from the house, as we deem it no longer safe.

Please, please, read her further descriptions and help us end this harassment.

Thank you,

Robert Shinn, Ph.D.

When Hell Came to Our Home October 13 Update

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Hi folks. Thanks for the info and the kind messages. I've been out of pocket recently. So far so good.

First up -- here is the link for a copy the message I found on my answering machine Saturday night:



http://filebucket.info/?1oo0r81rh

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=EDBCGQXQ


And a big THANK YOU to the cybergeeks who did that for me. If you want to help and have the ability, please mirror that for me. I'll add your links in later.

If you would, please someone make a slideshow using the audio and the transcript I posted earlier and post it to youtube. Please mirror that as well, and forward to anyone who might be interested in civil rights. Thank you.

Second -- DHS

According to the lawyer we hired to handle the DHS end, he spent three hours badgering them before they would even admit to having my name in their files. Then they wanted a release form. Then they spent even more hours giving him the runaround -- wrong person, wrong office, wrong directions et al. Then when he asked them to write down the complaint, they said a bunch of hooey but have so far refused to put anything in writing. ('m not surprised, because they never gave us anythign in writing either.) Some of the hooey isn't even legal in Mississippi.

They complained --

the house isn't clean enough, even though we cleaned it to their earlier (verbal) specs and got their (verbal) approval;

the floor isn't fixed, even though we repaired it to their earlier (verbal) specs and got their (verbal) approval;

(There was a background sense that we weren't acting "White enough", that we weren't living the way people of our socio-economic standing should live. That instead of buying a trailer and some land in the country, and building extensions as we went along, we should have "properly" bought a pre-made house in the suburbs and tied ourselves down with a huge mortgage. That we should buy all-new furniture instead of taking care of the old stuff we have. Apparently one can't be frugal and be a "good" person.

Some of the property is old, but it's all in good shape. The additions were built at above US Navy standards.);

that our homeschooled children needed to be tested to see if they were learning enough. THIS IS ILLEGAL IN MISSISSIPPI. Homeschooled children in Mississippi have to meet no testing requirements whatsoever: http://www.hslda.org/laws/analysis/Mississippi.pdf In fact:




"It is not the intention of this section to impair the primary right and the obligation of the parent ... to choose the proper education and training" for their children, and nothing in this section shall be construed to grant the State of Mississippi "authority to control, manage or supervise" the private education of children. "And this section shall never be construed so as to grant, by implication or otherwise, any right or authority to any state agency or other entity to control, manage, supervise, provide for or affect the operation, management, program, curriculum, admissions policy or discipline of any such school or home instruction program." Miss. Code Ann. § 37-13-91(9).

(The funny part of this is that when they asked to see the girls' schoolwork and I showed them their Singapore Math notebooks, Patti Young, aka DHS-1, couldn't even read the problems correctly out of my 9yo's workbook, and declared the 11yo's workbook was above her head.);

that our children need to be given a medical exam and vaccinated. Okay, we were holding off to see how the mercury content in modern vaccines was being handled, but the kids are old enough they may be safe. (I had an extremely bad reaction to an MMR shot once, and I was 21 at the time.) Still THIS IS ILLEGAL IN MISSISSIPPI. Only children entering the school system have to be vaccinated. http://www.msdh.state.ms.us/msdhsite/_static/14,0,71.html

(Also there was an issue with the age of the vaccines. I was at the County Health Clinic one day when a batch of "fresh" vaccines arrived and was left sitting on the reception counter. They were already out of date and had been culled from another medical center, with all the proper markers for rejects. This sort of thing does not inspire confidence.);

that I am "too depressed" to "properly watch my children" or to "properly homeschool". THIS IS ILLEGAL IN MISSISSIPPI. There's no requirements for homeschool teachers in our state;

that I should send them a copy of any lease I sign anywhere else so they can check out my new home and so they can transfer my case instead of closing it.

They said (but didn't put in writing) that if I moved they would drop the case. That doesn't jive with the above statement.

The lawyer wants to comply with all this. I suspect much of it will actually evaporate when they have to put it in writing.

Third -- the matter of the break-ins and the Sherrif's Department's actions. We're still working on this end. Everyone who hears about it is horrified, but most don't want to get involved.

Gotta go. Please pass this story along to any homeschool advocates, including Mississippi homeschool advocates, the Mississippi state senator who chairs the education committee, and anyone else who may be interested. Thanks.

When Hell Came to Our Home Update October 11

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I currently live at

591 Hwy 41 E
Okolona, MS 38860

Catherine Young's old trailer is next door.

Someone probably thinks i saw something or someone over there I should not have. Having me committed would discredit me as a witness. Please circulate this post.

When Hell Came to Our Home Part 2A

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I haven't talked much about the trailer next door. Normally I don't think much about it, but with all this trouble coming from that direction I'm reminded that things have been odd over there lately.

It's been abandoned for years, but the week before school starts there's a lot of activity going on over there. Lots of people in and out, lots of banging and remodeling noises going on, so much that I didn't notice anything odd about the banging noises the day our door was broken open.

Then there's the people, who gathered together to talk at the back door instead of the front door, the back door that can only be seen from our back yard. At least they did until the day the baby watched them, three days before this mess started. They watched me take him in. They haven't gathered at either door since then.

Then there's the inside lights, which are never on over there anymore, even though they seemed to be working fine the last time anybody lived there.

Then there's the night a whole bunch of people came over with a whole bunch of boxes. They turned off the outside lights, took a lot of boxes in, then took even more boxes out. Funny thing was they did it in complete darkness, with neither the inside or outside lights on, even though that meant negotiating stairs and uneven terrain in the dark.

Then there's the morning Bozo, the guy who lives there, cut across his front yard like he was coming to our front door. He saw me in the window, stopped, turned and glared at the street, then got in his truck and left. We'd been having a rash of damaged doorknobs about then.

Odd stuff.

When Hell Came to Our Home Part 4

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We went to see a lawyer we've had dealings with before today. Usually when he calls us up on Sunday he asks us to come over in the late morning. This time he wants to see us first at 6, then at 6:30.

When we reach his office, there's a campaign sign in the front yard for the County Attorney who won't return our calls.

We tell him about yesterday's break-in and the rest of the story while he texts. He doesn't want to get a subpoena to find out who called our house. He says the answering machine tape isn't the sort of evidence that will stand up in court. Only DNA evidence or pictures will.

(That's funny because when we were robbed two years ago the burglar cut himself on the glass of the window getting in and bled all over the floor. The Sheriff's Department refused to take a blood sample when we asked them to.)

He offers to help us deal with DHS. We take him up on it.

When we get home we find out that he was right. The answering machine won't stand up in court. Because while we were at his office someone broke into our front door and erased our answering machine, including the copy of the message that was on it.

Good thing there's more copies.

When Hell Came to Our Home Mega Post

Please repost this story far and wide. One forum already refused it as being too "troublesome", but I am terrified as to what will happen to my children and myself if no one knows.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 2A

October 11 update

October 13 update

October 14 Update

October 18 Update

October 21

October 22

November 19

November 23

November 28

December 4

December 9

December 16

December 18

January 17

February 26

Six Months Later

When Hell Came to Our Home Part 3

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There's some middle details, but we'll skip to the juicy bits. I'll fill them in later if I have the time.

Friday October 8

2:00

DHS-2 comes to our house. We've had problems with finding both the front and back door locks hanging half out of the door over the past few weeks (as well as both damage and cigarette butts in the backyard) so I've taken to locking the double-locked deadbolt all the time. Friday it's cranky from everything the door's been through and won't unlock for me. I go out the back door and come round the front to talk to DHS-2.

I tell her we're looking at houses nearer to where dh works, but they all need alterations. (We have two dozen poultry and henhouses are no longer standard issue.) The best looking one turned out to have problems on closer inspection, and may take months of repairs to get into shape, so we might not be able to move until spring.

DHS-2 expresses the hope that we would have already moved "So we won't have to involve the judge." She won't explain what she meant by that.

Previously she had brought boxes from the dollar store's leftovers to help me pack. I ask for more. She's surprised I've actually used the ones she brought. (Well duh, I have to pack for five people!) She says she'll be over with more boxes Tuesday or Wednesday.

Saturday October 9

2:45 we leave on a picnic and to do our monthly canned goods run. When we get home there's a strange message on our answering machine. According to *69, the call came at 3:27 yesterday afternoon and was from "662(local area code)/000-0000".

I'll try to upload the message later, but here's what we've been able to make out.

Male 1-Let me know cause I'm saying all you can commit -- if you bring a petula(?) it's going to be, "Hey you." Because she can't go out and commit the people but she can write them up. And you know, everybody should be told to bring somebody. So you know, you're paying for it.

Male 2-So you want me to tell her that, that I talked to you about it already right?

1-Uh-huh

2-Who?

1-I don't have nothing.

2-Who?


2-Oh, okay

1- I told her that.

2-Okay.

Female-Not Medicaid.

Male 3-Man I know a beep came on, that's all I heard.

1-Might be a blue card.

3-I guess.


Coincidentally(!) a medical record from the baby's birth was laying out of its folder on the counter about two feet from the phone with my husband's state-run Blue Cross health insurance number on it. We haven't had that folder open in over a year.

According to one source who wishes to remain anonymous who's heard the message, the male voices sound like members of the Sheriff's Department and the County Attorney's office.

We've talked to lawyers. We haven't found one who wants to touch this case. They say you take cases against the Sheriff's Department to the Attorney General. They also say the Attorney General's office won't do anything.

I don't know what will happen next.

When Hell Came to Our Home Part 2

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Sunday August 22

The three children and I arrive at a relative's house.

Monday August 23

Dh calls from Good Buddy's house. He says the Sheriff's Department won't return his calls. The police are asking questions at the telephone relay station.

Tuesday August 24.

Dh calls from Good Buddy's house. The Sheriff's Department still won't return his calls, and won't return calls from the police about the incident. The police tell them to come pick up the doorknob for evidence. They refuse. The telephone relay station refuses to talk to the police about our phone.

Wednesday August 25.

Dh calls from a cellphone. Good Buddy's phone has gone dead in the same way ours did. Good Buddy is a certified electrician. He traces the problem back to the phone being switched off at the relay station.

The Sheriff's Department won't return our calls. The relay station won't answer the cops' questions. Dh calls the County Attorney. He refuses to discuss the case. The cops call the Sheriff's Department. All they'll talk about is DHS-1 giving us 30 (not 25) days to clean the house. They refuse to discuss the doorknob or come get it.

Thursday August 26.

Morning

We don't actually find out what happened in the morning until days later. Mean Sister called the Sheriff's Department. She reported hearing me yelling at the children inside the house we hadn't been in since Sunday morning. She said the children screamed, she heard thumps, then silence.

What we heard was that the Sheriff's Deputy-2 (not Bozo), DHS-1, and DHS-3 come out to our house. Of course the house is locked and they can't get in. DHS-1 later said that DHS-3 said she saw a face at the window that looked like my younger daughter. They don't break in to investigate.

They call dh at work and demand he come home and open the door for them. "Home" is 90 minutes away. Dh calls and tells us what he knows. He gets home, tracks down Sheriff's Deputy-2, and unlocks the door and demands the Deputy search the house for the intruder the Deputy said was there earlier. The Deputy complies with a sick grin. Of course there's no one there.

DHS-1 demands that the children be seen by a Sheriff. Our relative calls the Sheriff of the county we're in at the time. He's a proper Sheriff (not like Bozo and company) and immediately comes out to investigate. I tell him this story and show him the baby's unburned feet, as well as the girls. He says he'll call.

Friday Morning.

The Proper Sheriff calls back to tell us DHS-1 is on her way. Seems she forgot to interview the girls. She says "of course" our safety has to come first. (That's the first -- and last -- time this idea is expressed.) She interviews the girls. According to our older daughter she asks about what TV shows they like (they hardly watch any) and their favorite movie. (DD-1 is annoyed she doesn't ask about favorite books.) Then she asked how we punished the girls and what their homeschool day was like. She leaves.

Friday afternoon we go home.

Then there's a frenzy of house-cleaning and home repairs. We fix everything they told us to fix. DHS doesn't acknowledge this fact. For the next two weeks their questions revolve around when we can move out of the house, the girls' homeschooling, and my mental health. They want me to give them my records and be evaluated by their counselor. I demur.

Then three weeks of silence.

Then last Friday things kick up again bigtime.

When Hell Came to Our Home Part 1

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Hi folks. We've had a pretty horrible school year so far. DHS showed up at our door, in a story that gets scarier and more bizarre the further along it goes. Here's how it started:

Introduction

14 years ago we moved to where we live now. Dh started teaching high school, and I started having babies. It's just outside town limits, and there's not many neighbors. At that time we had one good neighbor on one side of us. She was an older woman caring for her elderly mother who lived in the trailer between us, a "Granny cottage" to use the Australian term. We got along well, and I had many pleasant visits to her house -- except for one visit. Her grown nephew came over while I was there. I greeted him politely, and was abruptly told that as a female I was unworthy to be breathing the same air as he was, let alone talking to him -- only in shorter and ruder terms. I chose not to embarrass my Good Neighbor by asking about Bozo after he left.

Years pass, my Good Neighbor's mother dies, and my Good Neighbor moves to another town leaving the two houses beside me to her Mean Sister, who is Bozo's mother. Mean Sister is dogmatic and close-minded. She can't stand any woman who doesn't work and put her children in day care, or anyone who disagrees with her own far-right conservative views. My children and I are no longer welcome at her house. Still, we stay on amiable terms by never exchanging more than a dozen words
at a time.

Over the years the trailer between us that was her mother's retirement home gets used as a crash pad by various relatives down on their luck until they either find another place to live or simply can't stand Mean Sister any longer. We're used to having people pull up to it, stay for a while, and leave.

Last year the public high school where my husband works has a meltdown and gets taken over by the state. He scrambles and finds a job at a community college 90 minutes away. All this is widely talked about in the town where we live, as he's a popular teacher and the parents didn't want to see him leave. It's a very stressful time for us. Maybe people expected us to pack up and leave immediately, but we were too busy to even start looking for a place to move.

The school year starts. I'm busier than ever, what with two dogs, four ducks, two dozen chickens, two homeschooled children, a toddler, and getting dh off every morning. I sorta notice people moving in and out of the trailer next door, but I don't think much of it -- except to notice that when they gather together to talk at the door, as people are inclined to do before leaving, they don't gather at the front door. They gather at the back door, which can only be seen from our fenced-in back yard. One Thursday evening shortly after school starts the toddler comes with me when I go out to water the birds. He stands at the fence and stares at the group gathered round the back door. I scoop him up when I go back inside, but otherwise pay them no attention. I'm more concerned about the fact that they've taken out the old refrigerator and left it behind the trailer with the door standing open, and glad our children stay inside our fence.

The next Saturday all hell breaks loose.

Day 1: Saturday August 21, 2010

9:00 - The Natchez Trace Visitor's Center hosts a nature photography program in the morning. My husband and the girls go to see it and do some shopping afterward, leaving the toddler and I behind to catch up on our rest. We're in the middle of a heat wave, with the temperature over 100F every day, and the photographers hope the program doesn't get cut short due to the heat. It's going to be another scorcher.

12:00 - I check email. After a few moments, the (land-based) internet connection goes down. I think nothing of it, as this has happened before.

1:15 - I finish the scarf I'm knitting for one daughter and take it up front with the toddler following me. I go to the back of the house for the yarn for my other daughter's scarf. The toddler doesn't follow me. Perhaps he got distracted looking out the front window to see if the car is back yet. He does that a lot.

I hear a strange man's voice in my house.

The doors and windows are locked. How is there a strange man in my house? And more important -- where's my baby?

The man says that my toddler was found playing outside, in spite of the fact that the doors and windows are locked and the baby can't open them. I run out the open door and there's my baby in Mean Sister's arms. She yells at me that the baby was found playing in the road, she's called DHS, and I'm in "a world of trouble young woman!" There's something wrong with that statement but I can't put my finger on it at the moment.

I take my child and say that I'm going home to deadbolt my door. Mean Sister yells, "Don't deadbolt the door! Get another lock, but don't deadbolt it!" Weird.

I take the baby home and look him over. He's fine. That's weird for some reason too, but I'm more concerned about the door right then.

Obviously the regular lock failed. Because the door has a window in it that can't be secured, we have a double-sided deadbolt in it. Otherwise a thief would reach through the window and throw the lock. I get my keys to lock it.

While I'm trying to find the right key (I'd forgotten dh had borrowed it a while back) who should come up to my door but Mean Sister's son Bozo, whom I haven't spoken to in years. He says he's a Sheriff's Deputy now, although he's not in uniform and he shows me no ID. (I later found out he was hired on when the regular Deputies were shipped off to Iraq with their Reserve units.) He tells me that DHS is coming, but I tell him I'm more concerned about getting the door locked. I
notice that the regular doorknob has been pulled almost completely out of the door frame, the door frame is cracked even with the regular lock, the bottom of the door is kicked inward, and the frame of the door window has been yanked almost apart. I point all this out to him. He yells, "Don't lock the deadbolt!"

1:45 Dh and the older children come home, wet, muddy, and grinning from their nature photography walk. I tell dh what happened. He drops the groceries he's carrying on the floor and goes to check the baby.

1:55 A woman who identifies herself as DHS arrives (henceforth to be known as DHS-1), although she shows no identification. Coincidentally, her last name is the same as Mean Sister's mother who used to live in that trailer. It's not a common last name in our area.

DHS-1 says she heard the baby was playing in the middle of the road on the yellow line and wants to see the baby. That's when it hits me -- it's over 100F outside (102F we later learn.) My tender-footed baby is barefoot, as he usually is at home. There are no burns on his feet. There are no marks of any kind on his feet. How could he have made it to the middle of an asphalt highway?

I point this out to DHS-1. She ignores it. I point out the door being damaged. She ignores that as well.

Meanwhile, dh has taken the doorknob off the door and replaced it. The knob shows clear signs of tampering. He shows it around. The Sheriff's Deputy isn't interested. DHS-1 isn't interested. Since we live right outside the city limits, he calls the cops. The phone isn't working. He leaves to show it to the cops.

DHS-1 complains that there are canned goods in the floor from the groceries my husband brought in, that the girls are dirty from their nature walk, that not all the power outlets have baby blockers on them, and that there are a couple of soft spots in the floor. She wants to take pictures. I refuse.

DHS-1 wants to know if I have ever been treated for depression. Yes. She wants the records. I refuse.

Dh returns. The police are concerned about the doorknob. DHS-1 still is not. DHS-1 leaves, telling us we have 25 days to get the house cleaned and the floor fixed.

What with all the upset, it's nightfall before I get around to mentioning to dh that the internet went down right before this started. Dh teaches computer building and maintenance classes. He gets out his kit and checks the line. He reports back that there's 1/10th volt on the line, and the only thing that could have caused that would be if it were deliberately switched off at the relay station.

Dh goes over to Good Buddy's house to make phone calls. He calls the cops. They say, "Get out. Get out now. It's not safe." He calls a relative in another county for shelter.

Sunday Morning.

We throw everything in the car and leave for the relative's house.

Then things start getting scary.

To be continued.

Hi, sorry I've been away. In the past year my baby became a hyperactive toddler, my mother died and left her affairs in an emotional and legal mess, we got chickens and ducks and have been on a chicken-and-duck-related building spree, and my husband's workplace became unworkable and he got a new job 90 minutes away. I think that qualifies as "busy".

Details later.

Happy Fourth of July

233 years ago our Founding Fathers defied the Authority that had created their Colonies to declare these United States of America an independent nation with Liberty and Justice for all.

3 hours ago an American Fundamentalist Christian told me with a straight face that the definition of "sin" was "to defy the Authority that created you." I know, weird huh?

30 minutes ago we celebrated our country's birthday with Bison burgers, fireworks, and the Annual Sparkler Dance with Barking Terrier.

Happy Independence Day!

We seem to all be over the worst effects of the flue except for Sunshine. It hit her worse than it did the rest of us. Now we just need to get our strength back.

Got flue?

We have since Christmas. We're not just talking the at-least-one-day-down-for-one-day-up kind. We're talking about the kind where phlegm comes out your tear ducts - yuck! But aside from exhaustion and sore throats no one's really suffering, so I'm grateful for that.

27 inches

19 pounds

3 1/2 months old.

He started out on the highest trendline on the infant growth chart. Now he's above it.

And he's nursing like mad so he's obviously about to start another growth spurt.

I'm so tired I can barely remember my name. Lion-something?

Pre-teething. 'nuff said.

Special Needs Mother Leads the Heroes in New TV Show

I don't know when it's coming to America, but there's an interesting show on the BBC right now. It's Survivors, a six-part story about what happens to the survivors of a devastating plague that wipes out 99% of the population. The show is a remake of a 1970s series by Terry Nation, the Classic Doctor Who writer who created the Daleks, and the cast is chock full of New Doctor Who/Torchwood alumni. A groups of survivors bands together under the leadership of Abby Grant. Her qualification? Years of mothering a son with leukemia has left her practical, compassionate, and very self-disciplined. It's a heartening endorsement of what we all know but society usually doesn't acknowledge. Here's the website http://www.bbc.co.uk/survivors/

Benchmarks

This week Owl lay on his tummy, lifted his head, and kicked his feet up for the first time.

This week Sunshine made a 100 on a spelling test for the first time.

This week Brighteyes followed a recipe for the first time. She made biscuit dough for chicken and dumplings.

Today Owl made the "g" sound for the first time

Today Sunshine discovered that silent movies could be wonderful and not at all boring for the first time. (Thank you, Buster Keaton.)

Today Brighteyes laughed at herself for the first time.

Today I learned all over again that I can be completely exhausted and still be an okay Mom.

Not a bad week.

Election Day 2008

I'm always proud to be an American, but some days I'm prouder than others. Election Day 2008 was one of those days.

We've all been down with bad colds but I'll try to post soon. Owl was 13.5 pounds at his 7-week exam and is over 15 pounds at 11 weeks. He's gaining over an ounce a day, and it's all coming out of me.

Jackpot

Litttle Owl
Originally uploaded by CrabbyLioness

Sorry to take so long posting, but there's a new man in my life. We made contact a few months ago, but we didn't actually meet until last Tuesday. Since then, the greedy boy has demanded my attention for hours at a time. :)

Owl was born Tuesday afternoon at the midwifery center in Summertown, Tennessee. He's about 10 minutes old in the picture. He was 9 pounds and 21 inches at birth, and came after an hour and ten minutes of labor -- my longest yet.

We came home to north Mississippi Saturday, just in time for his first hurricane. (Don't worry, we're way above the evacuation zone.) I'll post his birth story in a few days.

Puttering Around

Okay. After three speedy labors my body has gotten tired with it's old pattern and decided to try something new. Now it's trying the "start and stop" pattern. "Let's try an hour or two of contractions every two or three days! And just as soon as Crabby is sure we're finally getting down to business (at 1:30 at night, mind you) let's stop!"

*Deep sigh* My midwife informs me this is a common pattern with third or fourth babies. She and her colleagues are convinced the best thing for me to do is lots of walking. Walk, walk, walk the baby out. There's some evidence for this, since the baby has been moving lower every time I move around and bounces back up when I lay down.

The problem is that I am so not a pleasure or sport walker. It's an efficient way to get from Point A to Point B but I overused walking for stress relief between grade school and high school (you can probably guess that story), and I've never really enjoyed it since. And that's without the 100F weather we're having.

No, I'd rather dance than walk. But it's been over a year since I took the time to practice, and I didn't bring any tunes. Where am I going to find Middle Eastern dance tracks in rural Tennessee?

But wait. The Farm hosts alternative music concerts. Surely the bands leave CDs at the store to sell. I search the bins and -- score! Amidst the folk songs and such I find a Tribal Bazaar and a Barracka Mundi. I am now in business.

(I love "folk songs and such" but this is edging out of pleasure and into neccessity.)

The dancing does help with the stress relief, even if all the "dancing" I'm up to at the moment is just walking around the room swinging my hips. My slow progress has been discouraging to me. I try to remind myself it's actually very good for the baby, but I don't handle frustration well. It's easy for it to set off my chronic depression, and that's the last thing I need.

So that's where things stand now. My husband is doing a fair amount of writing. The girls are alternating between working on their art and being bored out of their skulls. The library visits when are type these up are helping, but my husband thinks they'll be tired of them after today. We'll see how things go.

Me? I'm puttering around.

My actual due date isn't until Friday. I just gotta remember that.

Still here, Still Pregnant....

Two weeks later...

We left back for Tennessee the next day. It's been all quiet on the home front, with no more break-ins. It's been pretty quiet on the Farm too. We moved back into a different cabin, one across the road from our midwife's house.

I guess I should explain about the Farm Midwifery Center. It's the US's oldest freestanding (not directly attached to a hospital) birthing center. The Farm was established in Tennessee in 1970 as a hippie commune by a group of alternative lifestyle advocates from San Francisco. 38 years later it's still going as sort of a combination gated rural community/alternative lifestyle tourist attraction. It's biggest draw is the Midwifery Center.

The Center both takes care of pregnant women and trains midwives. The provide home births for local women, including the local Amish community. But they also have cabins available for women who come in from outside the area. Currently my neighbors include pregnant women from California, New York, and Illinois. We're the only ones who didn't fly in.

So basically, right now we're in a cabin in 40 year-old woods in the foothills of the Appalachias. The deer come up to the back windows. The midwife lives across the road, with more midwives down the street. There's a clinic within walking distance, a spectacular earthen swimming pool with a rock face diving cliff that's like something out of one of the more expensive hotels at Disneyworld just out of walking distance, good restaurants with cheap lunchtime buffets in driving distance, and a tourist town with a friendly obstetrical department that works with the clinic just down the road. I've had nothing to do but eat, sleep, swim and play tourist for two weeks. It's been incredibly relaxing.

It's been so blasted relaxing the baby hasn't wanted to come.

I've had three premature labors in a row. Since they were all eight and nine pound preemies, nobody was sure what the cause was. Now it looks like the premature labors might have been stress-related. This is the first time I've had a labor go full term. That's good. I keep telling myself that's good. The problem is I don't know how to cope with a full term labor.

I'm not used to the baby dropping and staying dropped. I'm not used to contractions that come and go, letting you get back to sleep. It's all starting to get a teensy bit annoying.

Meanwhile, we're not running short of days. My husband has been saving his leave days for this moment for seven years. He's enjoying the delicious feel of it being August and him not being in the classroom teaching a new class, although he has been asked to guest lecture at the Farm's alternative school.

Sunshine is taking it incredibly well. Brighteyes has had some trouble with the break in her routine. Not a day has gone by without her throwing a temper tantrum over something that she felt was out of place in some way. It's probably aggravated by her loose tooth -- she's always fussy when she's got a tooth coming out. Still, in the last few days we've made it clear that her fusses aren't helping the baby. She was shocked to realize the baby could hear her even though it hasn't been born yet. She's trying harder to keep it together. Now that she isn't spending so much energy on fusses, she's become an extremely prolific artist, doing two or three sketches a day. Her father is working his way through the exercises in How to Draw What You See and experimenting with some pastels I found on sale at a local Hobby Lobby. It's occurred to Brighteyes that she can invent her own art exercises, and she has been making detailed notes on how to draw hands.

Sunshine is drawing more as well, and is getting better at drawing individual objects. She's also working her way through a dinosaur coloring book.

I brought their math and spelling workbooks along as well. These were very helpful in the first week. Whenever they started to feel anxious and get fussy over the lack of a familiar routine, I would pull them out and they would calm down. By the second week they preferred to spend their time drawing.

And that's basically it. We've hit all the local tourist attractions and eaten at almost all the recommended restaurants. I found a consignment shop that sells new name brand children's clothing overruns for $1.50 to $5.99 and got a start on the fall clothes buying. I've almost finished the Torchwood audiobooks I never had the time to listen to at home. Tomorrow is our 20th wedding anniversary, and the day after that is the adjusted official due date.

I'm really, really ready for the baby to be born now. Okay baby?

A Really Awful Week

I left home to be closer to the midwives for the birth last week. I came home two days ago. No baby yet, but it's been one hell of a week.

Tuesday I ran around trying to finish the packing and get the house settled for our first vacation in 17 years. I was so busy I didn't conciously notice the heat index of 116F. Which isn't to say I didn't unsconciously notice it, as it sent me into precipitous labor around midnight.

All of my births have been precipitous. Once started, labor doesn't stop until late morning, when the baby is born. So, after a few frantic midnight calls to the midwives, we all agreed it would be best if I came on up.

Problem: the Sunshine and Brighteyes are sound asleep. This means an early-morning call to SIL to ask if she can come over and babysit. At 1 am. That she actually shows up is testament to her good character (a fact I sometimes have to remind myself of when -- but that's another story). So we get underway at a 2:45 am.

Did I mention the midwifery center is three and a half hours away? In the daylight? We get there at 6:45 am, find our cabin, and I get examined and immediately ordered to bed. My husband and I eat a cheese pizza we picked up on the way. I manage to convince myself it's really cheese toast with a fruit on the side in a slightly different format. Alas, my husband lacks my skill at self-delusion and had a harder time with it. We get a call from SIL to see if we made it, then crash for three hours.

SIL is supposed to call back at 11. No call. At 11:30 my husband leaves to pick up the girls. I try to talk him out of it, but he logically points out he has to pick up his paycheck today anyway, and he doesn't trust those jokers not to lose it on him. So he made the trip twice more while I got another checkup and slept the rest of the day.

With all the sleep I actually managed to stop the labor for the first time in four pregnancies. Maybe that wild yam extract the midwife insisted I take is actually doing some good. The family gets in around 10, and we finally get everyone fed, settled, and in bed around midnight.

We spent all day Thursday and Friday morning exploring, shopping for stuff that got behind left in the mad dash, and relaxing. We were feeling pretty good by lunchtime Friday when we got a call from SIL that our house now had busted-out windows.

My husband spent the afternoon and night on the phone getting damage reports while I packed everything back up. According to the searchers, the thief had broken through the window in the front door, found it unopenable, then broke a back window, made a mess, stole some change, and left without taking any large items. They couldn't tell what small items were missing and what were lost in the mess. I finally got my husband off the phone at 11pm so we could sleep.

Saturday morning I had an exam, was okayed with a stern warning to avoid stress, and we left. It was another over 100F day. The car, which had been doing fine, had it's air conditioner die once and it died twice on the way back.

The house was in a bigger mess than we'd been told about. On the other hand, it was in a mess when we left, so the searchers probably didn't realize what was us and what was the thief. On the third hand, the thief apparently found it hard to deal with. He checked a few stereotypical places, then stopped instead of doing the whole place.

Note to future thieves: even I'm not dumb enough to hide anything valuable in my panty drawer. We don't have a lot of pawnable swag. A fortune spent on books, DVDs, homeschool materials, and arts & crafts supplies isn't worth much at Leroy's Pawn Shop. It's called "investing in education". You may have heard of it?

Anyway, don't bother looking for the top pawn shop items here. I don't own any gold jewelry. I'm a silversmith, dude. That means everything I own is silver, and almost all of it is non-commercial and so distinctive tracing it would be a snap. Leroy wouldn't know what to do with it.

As for the electronics, the TV is 13 years old. The buttons have worn off the set and it has to be worked with a remote. The computer was assembled out of mostly second-hand parts put together from junked machines people brought my husband to work on. We're not worth breaking into.

Bah. It looks like the thief got a graphing calculator, around $100 worth of change inside two coin banks (one containing dd1's allowance for the past year!), a pearl necklace, some heavy commercial silver chains, a handmade silver and garnet chain, some carved wood and crystal boxes from my collection, a handful of Christmas candy(?), and some forty-watt light bulbs(?) he stuffed into a toy bucket and dropped in the backyard.

This paucity was not for lack of trying, mind you. He backed his car up to our front door with the intention of loading it up, but in the end he didn't find it worth the effort. We didn't design our house to be easy to steal from.

The next thief will have an even harder time. The broken panes have been replaced with a shatter-proof material, and the windows are being fitted with custom locks made by my husband. Never challenge a genius who has his own machine shop.

And the new front window is elegantly engraved with our family name, our business name, and a pair of dragons.

But the sherriff's department and our own searchers missed the Clues. The thief left his homemade club outside the window and left his bloodstains on the curtain and on the floor after cutting his hand opening the window. Pity we can't interest the sherriff's department enough to come collect them or even take our statement. We called and were told the officer in charge "had called this afternoon but no one picked up the phone". (Lie. Neither we nor the answering machine got any such call.) and wouldn't be available until Monday.

By Saturday night my (not) Good (definitely) Old PTSD was wearing off and I felt a bit -- frazzled. On top of all this I'm still almost 9 months pregnant and still under orders to avoid stress. And did I mention easily exhausted? It took me over 24 hours to type up this post, and I to stop once for contractions, which fortunately stopped with rest and plenty of water. I so don't need this right now.

And on top of everything else, it's probably guaranteed it'll be another 17 years before I get another vacation!

"I Got Sunshine on a Cloudy Daaayyyy"

Sunshine has hit a cognitive bump in her learning. Basically her short-term memory is shot to hell. You tell a story, she'll ask you to repeat it. She works a math problem, and two minutes later can't remember the answer and has to work it again. She looks at a word to copy it down and can't spell it correctly. She loses her pencil and her eraser half a dozen times each during every lesson. She turns over a card in Concentration (card game) and can't remember what it was.

Otherwise, she's smart as a whip. She knows how to spell most words, and her math reasoning skills, handwriting, and drawing are improving in leaps and bounds. She can often out-think her big sister when it comes to making connections and engaging her long-term memory.

That said, I'm about to tear my hair out in frustration. My husband reminds me that Bright Eyes hit a similar cognitive bump as well at 5 years old. True, but Sunshine is 7 years old, and it's harder to keep my patience sometimes. Still, it should clear up in time, when enough brain cells grow enough synapses for her memory to fully work. Not everyone's brain matures in the same manner or at the same rate. Until then it's just a waiting game.

At least she isn't in the school system. One of my husband's former students showed up the other day looking for help for his son. The boy had had a similar problem in his early grades and been labeled "special ed". The problem cleared up over time, but the label stuck. Now 10, he hasn't been challenged to learn anything and his father is starting to panic. At least with Sunshine I can repeat the material as long as it takes for her to master it.

Aaaand back again!

Our recurring problem with the telephone and internet connections being down during working hours tends to clear up within hours after complaining to the state utilities regulatory board. Three cheers for regulation!

Same Song, Second Verse.....

Once again, our phone and internet lines are completely down except for a few hours at night. Once again, I'm not a happy camper. I've been working on new posts. This development really throws a spanner in those works..

With the political campaign heating up, attention is beginning to fall on Bush's No Child Left Behind program for public schools. The program has drawn loads of scathing criticism for its top-down approach to solving problems and the inept way that it has been implemented in many schools, including the snarky No Child Left Behind -- Football Version

All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship, their footballs and equipment will be taken away until they do win the championship.

It would be a great analogy if it kept things in proportion. NCLB is not, as the blog claims, supposed to prepare children to win the championship. It's supposed to prepare children to qualify for the team. Way-big difference. Currently too many schools are not bothering to prepare children to qualify for the team.

The other day a young woman came over to our house for some math tutoring. She had graduated with good grades from the local "good" high school and is probably gifted, but she had never been taught the fundamental concepts she was supposed to learn. She couldn't subtract 0.5 from 6. While this distressed the adults in the room, it totally amazed my home-schooled eight year-old, who could do all the problems on the woman's college homework assignment in her head. I finally had to distract the child with cartoons before the poor woman died of embarrassment.

While NCLB is a step in the wrong direction, it only got passed because public schools weren't doing their job in the first place. To quote from today's AP article

Educators look at that goal and say, 'These people must be kidding,'" Petrilli said.

Even if educators have that view, parents don't, says Kerri Briggs, the Education Department's assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education.

"They would like their kids to be on grade level now and not 50 years from now, not 20 years from now, but this year," Briggs said.

Let's not even try to kid anybody. The only reason NCLB passed in the first place was because the public schools were broke and had refused to do anything substantive to fix their problems for decades. Desperation was the cause for NCLB, not malevolence. Yes, there are a few loonies around who want to end public education, because a working public education system (as opposed to the mess we got now) is essential to a working democracy. But NCLB was not passed because of a few loonies. It was passed because a substantial number of parents in this country are fed up with their schools not working.

Want to end government interference in the school system? Fix the blooming schools without government interference. If the schools are not willing to fix their problems on their own, they can't blame their customers, the parents, for trying to fix the problems for them.

I Ought to Frame This

"Dear Taxpayer,

"You are entitled to an economic stimulus payment of $xxx as provided by the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008. You can expect your payment by 5/23/08."

Honestly, how often do you get a note from the Federal Government saying, "Your check is in the mail"?

After weeks without reliable phone or internet, we finally got our line fixed. Turned out there was a loose wire on a pole outside our house. Then AT&T tried to charge us for all that, and tell us there was nothing we could do but pay up. A complaint to the State put paid to their little game.

Mississippi's First Big Budget Election

My family just survived our first big-budget political election. In previous years Mississippi has been too inconsequential for the Big Guys to bombard us with a propaganda saturation campaign. Not so this year unfortunately, as the race for the House of Representatives seat MS-01 seemed suddenly worthy of big-money mass callings, media, and mailings praising the virtues of the Conservative Republican candidate while accusing Democratic candidate Travis Childers of closing churches, not paying his own taxes, increasing taxes on others, and everything else short of eating babies for breakfast. Most of the attack ads turned out to be lies and all of them carefully avoided talking about the real issues, like the war and the economy.


I'm pleased as punch to report that the big-money ad campaign failed completely. Glenn McCullough, the Fundamentalist Christian Conservative Republican candidate who snowed in our mailboxes and whose flunkies called our phone 6-12 times a day with pre-recorded messages was about the first person knocked out of the race. Then we were blitzed with a fistful of anti-Childers mailings every day. My husband especially loved the one that linked Childers to Obama; he thought it was the best endorsement anyone could possibly offer Childers. The net result of all that garbage was that Democrat Travis Childers carried our county easily and won the race.

Hopefully the big-money people will have learned their lesson and we won't get a similar blanket of glossy over-sized postcards and annoying phone calls next election. Hopefully.


As for us, we voted for Green Party candidate John Wages until he was knocked out of the race. Wages was the only candidate running in favor of pulling out of the war. Then we switched to Childers for the runoff. Childers seems tolerable, but I could not in good conscious vote for someone who would, among other things, deny the sanctity of marriage to all single adults who seek it's blessings while a better candidate was on the ballot.


While looking for tonight's election reports I found a nice-looking blog for Mississipi Democrats called CottonMouth. It's good to see another Mississippi blogger who isn't a staunch Conservative; sometimes I feel a bit lonely.

The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class

Harvard Law Scholar Elizabeth Warren gave a lecture on what has gone wrong with the American Economic Dream. It's up on youtube here. Watch it. The sad but entirely predictable thing is that I heard all these statements 20 years ago in publications on the "radical liberal fringe". I did what I could to protect my family then, staying away from credit cards and debt. I figured, rightly it turned out, by the time the mainstream media picked up on the story it would be too late. Still, it's nice to see the government's figures backing everything up.

Keep in mind that what Elizabeth Warren talks about isn't news. It's history. She isn't talking about what is happening right now, but what has already happened while America has slept.

Blasted At&T

Thanks to our wonderful phone company and internet provider, we now have no phone or DSL during business hours and only intermittent service at night. AND they give me the run-around when I try to get it serviced. I am so not a happy camper.

March 2008 Update On the Girls.

Latin

We're starting over again on Minimus. It's a refresher for Brighteyes, but Sunshine needs it more. I had hoped both girls would precede at the same pace, but that's not to be.

Math

Brighteyes is working through Singapore 3 without any real problems. Sunshine is having trouble adding and subtracting above 10. She doesn't want to give up her fingers yet, even though she knows how to use the abacus. I'm printing her out worksheets from http://www.kidzone.ws/ for extra practice.

Spelling, Handwriting, Grammar

All going fine. Sunshine is through with her handwriting book and currently practices with Draw, Write, Now at the end of lessons. While Brighteyes inherited her father's command of the pencil, Sunshine has inherited my lack of command of the pencil. She's coming along with her handwriting with practice. I hope we'll show the same improvement with art eventually.

Brighteyes is working in First Language Lessons Volume 3. I really like the way these lessons integrate sentence diagramming into the lessons, teaching the parts of a sentence by teaching their place on the diagram. That makes so much more sense than the way my husband and I were taught grammar in grade school.

The importance of these skills really sank in to us this year. My husband is teaching a remedial test prep class at the high school. He began by spending two weeks teaching the parts of speach and sentance diagramming. The students had never been taught either skill before. They hated every minute of it! Why wasn't he teaching them math, which was on the test, instead of this garbage which wasn't on the test? They tried to sneak out at every opportunity, and he constantly had to round them up. But when they were tested after the first two weeks, every one of them had jumped a letter grade higher. It turned out grammar was on the test after all in every problem. Those poor kids had literally not been taught enough grammar to properly understand the questions they were supposed to answer.

History

Back at it.

Literature, Science, Art

Not back at it. I have hopes for it as soon as Sunshine stops throwing a tantrum at the start of every lesson. Brighteyes went through the same stage at that age. I hope Sunshine will also leave it behind when she turns 7.

Reading

Sunshine is working through her beloved Doggie Sticker Book and happily reads aloud the description of each dog.

Logic

Brighteyes has started on Mind Benders. At 8 1/2 she seems a bit young to me, but she is eating them up, completing 3 or 4 3-square logic problems a day. So, I'm ordering her the beginning set and the first Cranium Crackers book. That ought to keep her busy for a while. Sunshine is chomping at the bit to begin the Mind Benders Warmup, but I told her she had to finish first grade math before that.

Format

Right now we're splitting lessons. We work in the mornings until lunch, then resume after a 4pm snack. It's working for now.

One More Round!

I'm pregnant again, for the fourth time. It lacks the thrill of my first time, but it also lacks the stark terror of #2 and #3 after the death of my first child. I can live with that. More details to follow.

First Computer

We fixed up an old computer for the girls. It's on Windows 98, with no printer or internet access. It will play the older games and educational software though.

Brighteyes liked playing Jumpstart 3rd Grade on it, but other games haven't interested either girl that much. It's not as much fun as playing outside. That's a pretty good start in my book.

December Update

Must update blog.

We're still alive in spite of everything. Yay! But it's been an exhausting year and a half. I can't remember the last time I felt rested.

Part of my updating problem has been that Blogspot's new owners were constantly losing my password, making it too much of a hassle. That appears to have been fixed. Cross your fingers.

Brighteyes is eight now, and surprisingly responsible. She's doing a few chores and gets a $1/week allowance. Her handwriting has improved remarkably, and her ability to correlate things has grown in leaps and bounds. She's also finally started to figure out how to crochet, which she has tried to do without success for years. She no longer throws screaming fits over loose teath, although they still make her fussy.

Sunshine is six. She's incredibly bright, but she has the attention span of a kitten. Her handwriting has been very bad, but it's started to improve after I started making her try to read what she herself had written and she couldn't do it. Must remember that trick. She has also lost her first tooth.

We've been writing a jewelry-making book and trying to teach classes in Jackson, three hours away. We could now write a separate book titled Logistical Nightmares Associated With Distance Teaching.

We had a wonderful babysitter for many months whom the girls loved. Unfortunately transportation problems have recently prevented her from being with us anymore. We're going to see if we can fix this.

I haven't been doing much of anything else. The house is a complete disaster area and the tree isn't up yet. I sewed the girls up some pants for the fall, but that's all I've been able to sew. I've started crocheting while I sit with the girls for lessons to get something creative done so I don't go insane. I crocheted six hats for the winter. The girls got striped hats and got to pick out the colors. Then I took all the untangled a ball of cut yarn and crocheted the individual strings into flowers. I gave them to the girls to sew onto their sweaters. They've had fun arranging the flowers and sewing them on with a big yarn needle and yarn.

Now I'm feeling a bit more ambitious. Tonight I found a pound of a lovely varigated bulky wool yarn originally sold for $70 on sale for $15. After a quick look around I found a beautiful pattern that calls for just that. The problem is, it's got Martha Stewart's name attached to it. I don't care for Martha Stewart. In over 25 years, I have never heard anything that woman has said or done that wasn't stupid, venal, petty, ridiculous, and/or a health hazard. I don't want to look like I'm the sort of person who idolizes her. But that said, it's a real nice pattern. I really want to make it up. So I think I'll chalk it up to my philosophy that no human being is a complete waste of space, even Martha Stewart.

I'll try to post again before 2008.

School's Back

After limping through our first 100F summer in 10 years, cooler weather has finally arrived. We did lessons once or twice a week during the summer, now we're trying to get back to a daily schedule. The fact that it's cool enough to tempt the girls to go out more is helping keep them focused on getting through.

We're just doing math, handwriting, spelling, grammar, and a little Latin at the moment. We're all out of practice, so I'm holding off history and science until the girls get more used to the schedule.

Brighteyes is 8 now. She has lost four baby teeth and has 3 1/5 adult teeth. Unfortunately she fusses and screams up a storm when a tooth is getting loose. I've had to pull her last three teeth just to help her with the pain. Immediately after the tooth comes out she calms down, even though she insists has cranky mood has nothing to do with her bad mood and that the real reason is that the world hates her. I'm hearing a lot these days about how much I her daddy, and the world at large hater her. I'm told that some sensitive children are like this. Her father is of the opinion that it's better if she gets it out of her system now than when she's a teenager. There's some truth to that.

Sunshine is 6. She is smart as a whip and surprises us with the things she says. Unfortunately she rarely speaks clearly, usually rushing or mumbling her words, usually both. It drives me to distraction. I know she hates getting asked to repeat herself, but often even I can't make out what she's saying.

As for me, I'm getting over my depression. Previously I self-censored myself on this blog. I tried not to write about anything I couldn't put a positive spin on. Then came things like the Iraq War and mad cow disease, and how do you put a positive spin on those? The effort just made me frustrated and depressed. So you may see me ranting a bit more in these posts. Consider yourself warned.

First Lost Tooth

Brighteyes didn't cut her first tooth until she was 14 months old, so I wasn't too surprised that she didn't lose her first tooth until she was almost eight. We've been telling her to expect it for two years now. Still, she sobbed when she came ran up to me, crying, "Momma, Momma! My toothy fell out when I bit Sister! It hurts!"

For some reason she didn't understand why Momma fell out laughing, and chuckled all day long.

Long Time, No See

Hello, again. It's been a busy fall and winter, and I'm trying to get back to something resembling a schedule. But first let's catch up on old times.

Chimneyville

When you last saw us, we were heading toward Chimneyville for our first major show. It weeks to get everything ready. Finally, after a last-minute babysitter cancellation and replacement we were on our way. We were ready. We got there and found the other vendors were ready.

Unfortunately the management wasn't ready. There were new people running the show who didn't know what they were doing, and who had driven off the best customers with their pre-show scheduling blunders. Sales were terrible. We had entire days where we didn't sell a thing. So did the more experienced vendors around us. All in all we spent over $600 to get there and made $37.

But hey. It's just the first show. If we really get a move on, we can improve the look of our setup and quadruple our sales. We can slash expenses to the bone (after upgrading our setup, of course) and cut our costs in half. Then next year maybe we can spend $300 to go there and make $150.

It was even worse than I've said so far, but I don't want to go into the gory details yet. Just thinking about writing them down has kept me away from this blog for months. Maybe later.

New Project

My husband and I are working on a new project which is eating up large chunks of our time. Details to follow.

Homeschooling

We've had trouble with homeschooling for the past year. Last summer we let the girls take a couple of classes at the local summer workshop program. The year before they had been very well run, but last year they were run badly. All the girls came home with was a bunch of excuses in their repetoire, such as:

"It's too hard!"

"You can't make me!"

"I won't do X unless you do Y!"

*random screaming fits to disrupt lessons and everything else*

Those wear Mom out fast.

Then came Rightstart Mathematics. It's a lovely math program which I've heard nothing but good things about. It seems perfect for closing up some holes in my daughters' math education. But it takes 4 - 5 times the work out of the parent as any other math program.

Between the girls' fit-throwing, the work for the show and the new project, and the extra work for Rightstart -- I crashed. I crashed long and hard. We got down to doing lessons a few times a week, then not at all over the winter.

Spring came, and we're back to doing lessons now. Enough time has passed that Brighteyes actually wants them instead of fights them. We were far enough ahead that we're not behind on too much with her. I'm concentrating on math and English, catching up on the rest when I have the energy for it. Sunshine is still way ahead.

I haven't tried the Rigthstart program again, although I do pull out the manipulatives when Sunshine gets bogged down by mathematical concepts. I just don't have the energy to do more with it at the moment.

Doctor Who and Torchwood

While all this was going down, I found someplace to escape to from the madness for a while: Doctor Who. I loved the show as a teenager, but I was dubious of it's revival. Have you ever seen a show where the revival was as good as the original? It's theoretically possible but it never happens. It didn't happen with Doctor Who either. The revival is better than the original, which is way beyond all but my wildest dreams.

I've reviewed the first season here already. The second season was not as good as the first, due to it being rushed and revised several times (long story, but it wasn't the production crew's fault), but had some stellar individual episodes.

Then came Torchwood, the adults-only spin off of Doctor Who. Words cannot express how much I love this show. And yes, before we go any further, the first season was badly flawed. The series didn't have enough production time, and what little they did have was cut in half by technical problems with their cameras. The writing was experimental, and not all the experiments worked. But what they did right hit all my buttons.

Torchwood is about a group of ordinary people whose job it is to save the world from alien invasions without letting the world know that aliens exist. They don't know very much about aliens, they are hideously underpowered and understaffed, the job has an incredible stress load, a tremendous death toll, and nobody who works there longer than six months is sane anymore -- they know all this and they still show up for work every morning because somebody has to do the job, and for lack of anybody better qualified it looks like its going to be them. That whacks the biggest button I've got square on the nose.

In the first episode you find out that a fairly likeable Torchwood employee has been driven crazy by the job and become a serial killer. The policewoman who uncovers that is offered the job of replacing her. In spite of what she just uncovered she thinks she can turn the organization around and make them all happier, saner people.

You just know she's going to end up the craziest one of the lot. Well, I did at any rate. And by the end of the sixth episode she's jumped off the deep end with the rest of them. But she's just one member of an ensemble cast, and some of her coworkers are far more interesting and/or admirable than she is.

But Torchwood is an adults-only show, and I don't feel comfortable talking in detail about it on a homeschooling blog that children can read. It's rated for ages 15 and up, with good reason. I don't let my own 6yo and 7yo watch it. So I have a separate lj account for my analysis, speculations and fan fiction about Torchwood. If you're old enough and interested enough in the show, click on it.

Writing

You read me right. I've been writing fiction. Well, it's "missing scene" sorts of things, with someone else's characters and setup, but it's a start on something that has absolutely terrified me in the past. I'm told I'm pretty good with voices and pacing, which is good to know. It was very hard the first time, but the basics have become easier. I'm still setting new challenges for myself though, and each one is scarier than the last. Hopefully I'll eventually work my way up to original setups, and then on to original characters.

In the meantime it looks like I may be doing some nonfiction for publication. Wish me luck.

A poem from my husband.

There is grass under the swings.
There is grass under the seesaw.
There is a bird's nest on the slide.
Testing is more important than childhood.

Happy New Year

After a long and frustrating December, I'm back.  We're in the middle of a computer upgrade that should be finished in a day or so (knock on wood).  After that blogging should recommence with commentary, war stories, reviews and maybe even a bit of comedy.  Maybe.   Looking forward to seeing you then. 

Chimneyville

My husband and I will be selling our jewelry at the Chimneyville Crafts Festival in Jackson this weekend. Hopefully after that I'll be able to come up for air.

Pumpkin Patch

We went to the Pumpkin Patch at the Tupelo Buffalo Park with a group of families from PEAK. They had a haybale maze which everyone enjoyed, even the lady who lost a pair of glasses in it and walked over it three times with helpers before she found them. The children played themselves out.

Autumn has been hard for us. My husband has had commitments almost every evening for over a month. I'm left alone at home with the girls all day and a good part of the night. We can't find a babysitter and we've only got one working car, so the girls and I are pretty sick of each other right now. Brighteyes has been so fussy we got down to doing lessons only one or two days a week, then stopped completely. I don't have the energy to deal with all her screaming.

I've also felt the urge to write fiction again. Fiction is a lot more uncomfortable for me to write, what with getting inside another person's head instead of just blathering my own thoughts. It feel much more intimate. I can't do it with anyone making noise near me, let alone standing over my shoulder. But I'm never alone. I can already feel the urge dying inside me from not having a chance to get out, and all I've written are snippets. The girls don't understand why I need to be alone, and it makes them cling to me even tighter. I don't know what to do.

We set up at the Rock & Gem Show on the Old Miss campus yesterday. Our babysitter cancelled at the last minute, which threw everything up in the air. We took the girls along, and I must say they were very well behaved. It still put a spanner in the works.

Note to self: always put out your own press release. Don't rely on the show to do it for you. That's the only way to control the quality.

It's the first time I've been on a college campus that had a football team since "tailgate parties" became big business. How on Earth do the students stand it? There were thousands of strangers everywhere, spending huge sums of money to rent dinky tents, grills, beer kegs, and satelight dishes that littered every inch of grass on the campus and made driving impossible. And this goes on for every home game? Unbelievable. The Administration's response to that lunacy had been to move the game time back to 8:00 to encourage it. I went to the football-free Mississippi University for Women and later attended the University of Southern Mississippi before tailgate parties were hot. Weekends were down time. They were time to chill out and catch up on your friends, your sleep, and your homework. I couldn't have stood that insanity twice a year, let alone every other weekend. I was shocked at the Ole Miss Administration, as it looked like they were placing money-making opportunities way ahead of the needs of their students.

We were set up at the Oxford Train Depot. It's a 135 year old brick building with hardwood floors. It's lovely, and the brickwork is in fabulous shape. My husband walked with the girls up to the Ford Center for the Performing Arts. It's a 10 year old building that looks really impressive from a distance. Get up close to it and you'll see that the "brickwork" is actually concrete slabs with caulk holding them together instead of brick and mortar. Find a place where the caulk is peeling off and you'll see cardboard shims under the caulk. One of these buildings will still be here in another 100 years. The other won't.

We're still getting back in the rhythm of lessons. We managed to have them three days this week. Yay for us! And Brighteyes is now taking lessons with Sunshine. Double yay! She's learning cursive, and finds it difficult but exciting.

My husband had to go to the high school homecoming game tonight. He said the entire homecoming court was escorted by either their fathers or their first cousins. None of them have boyfriends to escort them. The high price of gas is putting a severe crimp on the high school dating scene.

We'll be at Ole Miss tomorrow setting up at a Rock & Gem Show. It's our first show of the fall.

Yesterday morning we all got up late. I was the last person to stumble into the bathroom. As I wandered around it in my birthday suit trying to wake up my brain, I noticed a yellow towel folded on the counter beside the sink. I had placed it there the night before so some toys I washed could air-dry. I had put away the toys before going to bed, but one of the girls' toys was laying on it. Good, they must have washed one of their toys themselves for a change. Which one? Ah, the toy snake their grandfather gave them. Haven't seen them playing with that for a while.

I sat down. I looked around. I looked at the toy. I admired the workmanship. It was well made.

The girls' toy snake was green.

This one was black.

And yellow.

And had a diamond pattern on the back.

BADSNAKE!

I got to my feet and backed out of the room.

Rattler or cottonmouth?

They're first cousins, whatthehell does it matter when one of them is on your freakin' bathroom counter! "Only aggressive when cornered" or "always aggressive" is immaterial when it's effectively already in a corner.

I called to my husband, "Come here now."

"Whuh?"

"Come here now!"

He walked in, also in his birthday suit, looked, and said, "Cottonmouth." That's cleared up. It's the "always aggressive" one. "Where are the girls?"

"Outside in the playhouse."

"Keep them out, keep the dogs out, watch that."

Clothed and shod, he stepped out to the workshop and came back with leather gloves, a one-inch wood dowel, and the long-handled tin snips. Sunshine came up and tried to walk into the house. I told her to go back to the playhouse until Mommy and Daddy said she could come in, don't fuss, it's important. She protests, I repeat myself. She turns around and screams only once, which is incredible self-control for our five year-old Scream Queen.

Unfortunately the snake heard her and -- disappeared.

We search the floor. No sign of the snake.

We start carefully pulling stuff off the counter. It was coiled up under some ointment bottles, ready to attack the first thing that moved.

It got the end of the dowel on its back behind the head. As it tried to strike at the dowel, the long-handled tin snips took off its head.

My husband carried it out the front door by the tin snips. He crushed and buried the head, then asked me to call in the girls.

"Come in and see this."

Brighteyes asked, "Why?"

"It's a lesson."

"Lessons on Saturday? Before breakfast? That's not fair!"

We showed the girls the snake. Even headless, it still looked more impressive than the ones at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science had looked two weeks ago, probably because it was on their front steps.

My husband had been in the bathroom shaving only minutes before me and hadn't see it, so it must have just come in. At a little over a foot long, it was a juvenile looking to mark out its own territory. No other snakes around then. We search the house anyway. We found the entrance point, a tree branch touching the bathroom window where there was a gap in the frame. We lop off the branch and seal the gap.

We tried to recover enough to get the rest of the day's work done. Somehow that wasn't as easy as it sounds.

Celtic Fest 2006

We went to Celtic Fest this weekend. It was a bit disappointing. There was Irish singing and dancing for hours, but there wasn't anything else. The Highland games and other events that the festival used to boast about were gone. There was hardly even any vendors, to the disappointment of many people. They'd be better off changing their name to Celtic Music Fest and not getting people's hopes up.

While we were there we took in the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science and the Small Town exhibit at the Mississippi Agriculture & Forestry Museum. There wasn't anything else to do except sunburn.

We're going to Celtic Fest this weekend. It will be our first time there. Two years ago I actually got my husband in Jackson the weekend of Celtic Fest, but he balked at the sight of the crowds. This time we're going in.

Still getting over some stupid sickness.

This week lessons went easier, but they were still very tiring. I only managed to give lessons three days a week. That's an improvement though.

Brighteyes and Sunshine are still moaning about starting back up, but they're getting more in the rhythm. I still can't give them lessons at the same time. I have to give Sunshine her lessons in the morning and Brighteyes her lessons in the afternoon. Brighteyes is too fussy in the morning. Sometimes she'll try to throw a screaming fit in the morning during her sister's lessons. I'm trying to encourage her to go play outside at that time. By the afternoon she's calmed down enough to do her work with a lot less fuss, but mornings just aren't working for her.

This means I have to spend twice as long giving lessons, and I'm not getting anything else done. Period. I'm so worn out all I can do is collapse when we get through. I haven't been this exhausted since I was tandem nursing.

Hopefully it will get better soon.